Wrong person for the job?

[liv]

This worked really well when I had to lead a seminar about obesity, so let's try it again. I've somehow been volunteered to run a first year session on childbearing and reproduction. It's a bit of a grab-bag of stuff, like a lot of our first year curriculum it's pretty much just introducing the students to the issues that exist. They will revisit this stuff later in the course, don't worry, we're not trying to teach them absolutely everything they need to know about childbearing in a single afternoon.

The rest of the module is about the actual mechanics of reproduction, conception, pregnancy, labour, foetal development etc. This session is about childbearing in social context. So, does anyone have anything they'd like me to convey to some future doctors about:

• Teenage pregnancy and young parenting
• Treated or untreated infertility
• Involuntary childlessness (ie unwanted childlessness caused by not finding a partner or not being in life circumstances to have children, as opposed to physiological inability to successfully sustain a pregnancy)
• Deliberately delaying childbearing for career and other economic reasons
• Social gender roles and expectations affecting childbearing decisions
• Cultural variation in all of the above

Like I said, quite a grab-bag, and to me the glaringly obvious hole in it is that there's absolutely no GSM perspective, but that's tied up with other stuff about the way the curriculum is structured (basically we don't really introduce complicated advanced concepts about gender and sexuality until the third year). Though at least there is explicit acknowledgement that this stuff is important for men, it's not purely a women's issue.

Me, I'm happily childfree, and I haven't even experienced much of the pressure to reproduce that some childfree women report. So I can't bring the same degree of personal experience I did to talking about the medical profession and fat people. But if there are any misapprehensions you would like me to address, or hurtful stereotypes and ways of talking about these issues that I should avoid, I'd be glad to hear about them! Again, I want to be very aware that these issues affect the actual students in the discussion as well as their hypothetical future patients; some of them are mature students who might have had any kind of life experience, a minority but a few of them are right now combining parenting with medical studies, and I shouldn't make assumptions that none of this stuff is relevant to the more "traditional" ie 18-year-old students straight from school.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

If context helps, the author of the post was a college senior who was raised on food stamps and graduated top of her class in high school. My impression from reading the post was that it was the first thing she'd read in college — surrounded by all the upper-middle-class kids you are surrounded by in college, especially at an American small liberal arts college — that actually validated her own experiences and those of her family. She may be painting a rosier picture than the grim realities you're dealing with, but I also think she is othering "the poor" a lot less than you are assuming she is.

The biggest takeaway I got from this article was the idea that having a child early could seem like a logical choice, to someone making that choice, especially if it doesn't look like they have a lot of options anyway. Maybe not a wise choice in the long run, but not quite as astoundingly stupid as it seems to the average upper-middle-class kid from a good school who ends up going to medical school, either.